Why these are the spine of your legacy

You’re Play-Doh when you’re young.

You’re soft, squishy, with no particular color at first. But over time, you take on different bits and pieces of multiple colors that you encounter in life and incorporate them until you are a kaleidoscope of reds, blues, greens, very much like my three-year old’s resulting ball of said material after an hour with it. It’s like one of those memories you see at in Pixar’s “Inside Out”, a ball tinged with all the emotions that one experience can bring.

Your values take shape exactly in this way.

The social media guru’s buzzword

“You need to bring value to your customer.”

During my time on the platform previously known as Twitter, this word was thrown around a lot. Post after thread after post in my timeline had some variant of this, and it became overused. If it were the Play-Doh that I used in the introduction, then it started out as a colorful ball and proceeded to be kneaded, punched, and rolled until it was nothing but that ugly, greyish brown mass after all the colors have been used up.

By the time the collective gurus had moved on to “authentic”, there was no value left.

The definition of it is rather extensive depending on the context of its usage as a noun, a verb, or an adjective. We’ll focus on the fourth one from Merriam-Webster: something, such as a principle or quality, intrinsically desirable. It can become meaningless if we try to wax philosophical about it so don’t overthink it.

It’s basically what matters to any degree to the individual.

The next term that we’ll talk about this week is dependent on this one.

Your uncle may have uttered this at family gatherings

“It’s the PRINCIPLE of the matter!”

If you haven’t heard a relative blurt this out in a drunken response to an episode of when they haggled over the price of a box of chicken wings at the store, then perhaps you’ve seen it uttered in some way, shape, or form in your favorite TV sitcom.

I digress, but basically it’s how we act on our values.

You don’t have to insist on the importance of why you stood up for something based on the moral high ground in everything in life (that gets exhausting and rather irritating), but it’s the thing that causes decision fatigue for the most part in your daily life. Your actions are a function of your principles which are rooted in your values. What matters to you is brought into reality through what you say and what you do.

You —> Values —> Principles —> Legacy

A spine of steel

Nobody is remembered for being a pansy.

Think of the masses that blindly follow whatever they’re told to do without question. When you surrender your autonomy and your authority to someone else, you give up any thought of reference to your values and take on theirs. Your principles are no longer yours because you aren’t acting on your values. Your legacy is one that becomes meaningless.

You’re part of a cult at that point.

That’s the extreme version of what happens, of course. Creating a lasting legacy requires identifying your core values, and those are determined by observing and reflecting on all your past actions. Just looking back on what you said and what you did today at work and at home can make it obvious.

For example, one of my values is cleanliness.

I’m in charge of taking care of my family that consists of my wife, my two kids, our two dogs, and our four cats. Every single day, I take out the dishes from the dishwasher in the morning, wipe down the countertops, make the beds and the sofa, scoop the poop from the litter box and the backyard, and shovel a mountain of laundry that seems to magically grow from the other side. I make it my principle to leave the house as I found it in the morning when I go to bed at night.

Could you imagine the state of our house if I didn’t have this value?

The strength of your conviction is indicative of how often you exercise your principles. The more you do so, the more apparent it is to others. If you have a clear set of values, then your principles will shine. Don’t be a wishy-washy individual with a set of fair weather principles (i.e., I clean when I feel like it). There’s no legacy behind being someone who has the consistency of gruel.

Get going and define a few

This isn’t a role-playing game.

There’s no set list of values out there that you have to pick from and run with. You’re a full-grown adult (at least that’s who I write to here), and you’ve been around long enough to have a sense of what you GAF about.

On that note, I recommend reading Mark Manson’s two books about the topic.

Something for you to chew on today:

Think about what you say and do on a regular basis and reflect on how you’ll be remembered by your loved ones someday. See if you can trace them back to three values and define the principles that illustrate them.

If you’d care to share them, comment below!

P.S. Mine are “cleanliness, care, and commitment.”